Ruefully observing statistics
showing that only 6 percent of American Catholic parishes considered evangelism
a priority, the late Cardinal Avery Dulles once lamented, “The Council has
often been interpreted as if it had discouraged evangelization.” Ralph Martin’s book Will Many Be Saved?
What Vatican II Actually Teaches and Its Implications for the New
Evangelization, aims to explain why this interpretation has taken root
despite the fact that the Council documents, particularly the keystone document
Lumen Gentium (LG), are brimming with talk about evangelization as the
Church’s main job. In fact, Paul VI’s
encyclical Evangelii Nuntiandi stated that the objectives of the Council
were summed up in one statement: “to make the Church of the 20th century ever
better fitted for proclaiming the Gospel.”
Yet the opposite happened.

Martin thinks, and with reason,
that the loss of impetus to evangelize is based upon the widespread notion
after the Council that almost everybody will be savedexcept maybe really evil
people like Hitler and Judas. Having the
sacraments or an explicit faith in Christ is seen as a nice add-on. But essentially the theology of salvation could
be summed up by the 1989 cartoon movie All
Dogs Go to Heaven.

Of course this theology had
backing from big names. Karl Rahner
declared that the Council had a “theological optimism…concerning salvation.” Richard McBrien’s commentary on Lumen Gentium claimed that the Church
now considered the human race as “an essentially saved community from whom a
few may, by the exercise of their own free will, be lost.” Even the Jesuit scholar Francis Sullivan,
author of a very careful study of the teaching on salvation outside the Church,
tended in his more popular writings to throw caution to the wind and claim a “general
presumption of innocence which is now the official attitude of the Catholic
Church.” These claims were never
undergirded by any actual citations or close readings from the Council, which
marked a doctrinal development indeed, but not one of automatic salvation or “presumed
innocence.”

While the question of the
salvation of peoples who have never heard the Gospel has been bubbling up in a
new way since the 16th-century discovery of peoples in the New World, it had
been coming to a steady boil more than a hundred years before Vatican II. The categories of invincible ignorance
(whereby one could not be held accountable for not knowing about Christ and the
Christian message) and implicit faith (whereby the invincibly ignorant might
embrace as much truth as God has allowed one to receive and thus embrace Christ
implicitly) have been around for a while.
That arch-traditional pope Pius IX had already given assent to the
possibility of salvation outside the visible boundaries of the Church in
encyclicals in 1854 and 1863.
This view was even included in a draft document of the First Vatican
Council (which was never finished because of the Franco-Prussian war’s
interruption). The Second Vatican
Council’s teaching of this possibility of salvation outside the sacraments and
explicit faith, then, was the culmination of a long doctrinal development that
had already been given expression by the papal magisterium a century before
Vatican II.

Martin affirms this development,
noting that LG 16 very clearly indicates the possibility of salvation outside
of the visible Church and explicit faith. That key passages states:

Those who,
through no fault of their own, do not know the Gospel of Christ or his Church,
but who nevertheless seek God with a sincere heart and moved by grace, try in
their actions to do his will as they know it through the dictates of their
consciencethose too may achieve eternal salvation. Nor shall divine providence deny the
assistance necessary for salvation to those who, without any fault of theirs,
have not yet arrived at an explicit knowledge of God, and who, not without
grace, strive to lead a good life.
Whatever good or truth is found amongst them is considered by the Church
to be a preparation for the Gospel and given by him who enlightens all men that
they may at length have life. (LG 16)

Notice, however, that simple
ignorance, even ignorance that could not be helped, is not a sufficient
condition for salvationsincere seeking of God, a real attempt to follow the
dictates of conscience, and an embrace of whatever truth is given are all
necessary. To such people “divine
assistance” will be given. But notice
also that the Council Fathers said that such people “may” achieve eternal
salvation. But what is so striking is
that even when this passage is quoted, the final lines which warn of the
dangers to those outside of the faith are rarely quoted and even more rarely
commented on at length:

But very
often, deceived by the Evil One, men have become vain in their reasonings, have
exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and served the creature rather than the
Creator. Or else, living and dying in this world without God, they are exposed
to ultimate despair. Hence to procure the glory of God and the salvation of all
of these, the Church, mindful of the command of the Lord, “Preach the Gospel to
every creature,” fosters the missions with care and attention. (LG 16)

Far from a human race that is
presumed innocent or essentially saved, the Council Fathers see a world in
which salvation is neither assured nor easy.
It is a world in which, “very often,” rejection of Christ has been a
reality, is still possible, and is a main reason for Christian missions. Indeed, the Council also warned about the
severe judgment falling on Catholics who do not persist in charity and
faithfulness.

The Council’s “optimism,” Martin
rightly notes, is about the possibility of salvation outside of the Church, not
the probability that everybody inside or outside it will be saved. The Council doesn’t give odds on this
question or tell us whether Hell is densely populated or not, nor does Martin
attempt to do so. But he notes that the “very
often” is attached to the negative possibility. In a chapter examining the
scriptural references in LG 16 he demonstrates that this bad news is indeed
biblical. Where, then, did the All Dogs view of the Council come
from? Mostly from two sources: Karl
Rahner and Hans Urs von Balthasar.

While Martin is clear that he
respects both theologians and acknowledges their own pastoral desires, what is
demonstrated in the two chapters covering their thoughts is how little backing
they had in their own theories. Rahner,
while occasionally acknowledging that the Council did not actually say anything
new doctrinally on this topic, used the tactic that would later characterize
the Bologna school: in Ratzinger’s words, the Council’s texts were interpreted
as “a mere prelude to a still unattained conciliar spirit.” Thus, Rahner’s foundations for hope in
universal or near-universal salvation were founded upon his own particular
theological visiona vision that gave little attention to the whole witness of
either Scripture or Tradition on this point and (as he later acknowledged)
underestimated the reality of sin.

While Rahner may have ignored
Tradition and Scripture, Balthasar professed to be a man who paid attention to
it all. Martin’s brief against him
shows, however, that on his professed “theological hope” for universal
salvation (best glimpsed in his book Dare We Hope That All Be Saved?),
Balthasar has a tendency to ignore and occasionally mischaracterize his
sources. Martin offers devastating
critiques of his use of Scripture, the Fathers, and indeed logic. Balthasar quotes scriptural passages without
even their immediate context, adduces witnesses who do not say what they
purportedly say (e.g. Maximus the Confessor’s supposed embrace of
universalism), and claims that one cannot love people sincerely if one believes
that anyone could possibly reject Godthe last a strange claim indeed given his
view that the saints stand high as theological authorities. Finally, he seems to back up his positions
with rather extravagant extra-biblical speculations about conversions in Hell.

Martin argues that the universalist-tending arguments of Rahner
and Balthasar were a significant factor in the post-conciliar belief that
preaching the bad news was a hindrance rather than a help in evangelization.
Whether or not they actually agreed with the speculative views of the
theologians, many bishops and pastors embraced the idea that the Church would
be better off if it stopped talking about sin and hell and accentuated the
positive. As one theologian in 1973 wrote, with this strategy, “men will storm
her doors seeking admission.” The result
has been less than spectacular. Rare are
the people who will spread the faith merely because the Church says so if there
is no point to it other than drawing new members into “our community.” To paraphrase Flannery O’Connor, if the
Church isn’t a place of salvation, it is simply an Elks Club. And the Elks aren’t doing that well these
days either. It was Rahner, after all,
whose talk about the “optimism of the Council” yielded at the end of his life
to essays on the “winter of the Church.”

Martin does not spare bishops or
popes in his criticism of this strategy of talking only about the
positives. Paul VI’s and John Paul II’s
encyclicals on evangelization, Evangelii Nuntiandi and Redemptoris
Missio, are scored for omitting “the traditional focus on the eternal
consequences that rest on accepting or rejecting the gospel that motivated
almost two thousand years of mission.”
Martin calls for an end to this “unwise silence” about a significant
part of the Christian message. It is a
particularly heartening sign that his book is blurbed by seven U.S.
bishops. Perhaps these endorsements are
a sign that what Russell
Shaw once called the U.S. bishops’ “Potemkin Village” is now being torn
down.

Martin’s one misstep is that he
too quickly passes by the question of the danger to non-Catholic
Christians. While Vatican II’s
recognition of the power of salvation at work among other Christians separated
from the Catholic Church is accurate, it is perhaps a little too pat. Martin does not mention the dangers to
Christians whose baptisms are valid but who do not have the fullness of the
sacraments or the guidance of the magisterium to help them in a world in which,
as he notes, the culture’s morality moves further from Christian teaching every
day. The bad news is for all of
usCatholics, other Christians, and non-believers. We all need to hear it if the good news is to
make sense. And we all need to hear it
because it’s true.

Will Many Be
Saved? What Vatican II Actually Teaches
and Its Implication for the New Evangelization

David Paul Deavel is associate editor of Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture and adjunct professor of Catholic Studies at the University of St. Thomas (Minnesota).

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